Modern television services, such as satellite, cable or other types of digital transmission services, provide the user with electronic program guides (EPG), also sometimes referred to as interactive electronic program guides (IPGs). EPGs are executed on a user's television receiver, such as a set-top-box (STB) and provide an interface for the user to access program data such as start times, program lengths, titles and so on. As the number of channels has increased, so has the volume of EPG data.
In addition to typical EPG data such as program title, start/end time, titles and so on it is becoming common to send additional data containing further information relevant to individual programs. This additional data is provided as metadata, the term generally indicative of data that describes other data. EPG type data can be considered as metadata, as can other information related to a program such as category, featured actors, production date, director and so on. This type of metadata, containing attributes or descriptions of a television program will be referred to as program metadata.
Unfortunately, whilst the amount of program metadata being sent to television receivers had increased, the ability to search such data has not improved sufficiently to allow efficient or easy use of any additional program metadata.
United States Patent Application US 2008/0060008 describes a method in which the EPG metadata broadcast to a television receiver is edited to include additional metadata, and specifically keywords associated with each television program. However, the resulting search performed by the television receiver is intended only to identify similar programs by matching multiple predefined keywords. This means that the user is only able to search for similar programs as defined by previously created and categorised keywords, according to a predetermined importance level.
What is required is a method of searching for programs using program metadata in an intuitive and easy to use manner.